We were having our usual Saturday morning breakfast, my dad and I, and talking about the war, something we often did. He fought through a number of campaigns in the South Pacific during WW II as a Marine. This time turned suddenly grim and tragic, reflecting what haunted my dad. As we faced each other over the restaurant table and he talked, his face turned to grief in front of me. “What we did was murder, just plain murder!” he exclaimed; then he wiped tears and recovered.
I did not pursue nor dig; I knew enough about the fighting in those places to know horror was as much a companion as tedium. My dad described going out on patrol looking for Japanese soldiers to kill as just like going to work every day. I understood at that moment why he had told my wife and me, when we invited him to come live with us, “No, I can’t. I have to pace up and down in my skivvies thinking about that goddamn war.” That’s what he did underneath every day of his post-bellum life, think about that goddamn war.
He was never wounded despite engaging in hand-to-hand combat. He once related how a soldier saved his life when an enemy dodged his bayonet thrust and rifle-butted him into unconsciousness and the mate shot the enemy soldier as he was about to plunge his bayonet into my dad, making me an orphan. Instead a little kid in Japan lost his father that day. The price of war.
Why did this expression of grief come that day when he was in his 80s? Why not all those other times he explained his duties, the operation of landing craft (which often dropped him in water over his head at 5’6″), and other stuff that fascinated both a boy and a man fascinated by war? I believe his age was weakening him and that made him less able to hold back the grief and the tears.
Once, in that same restaurant, I spotted a man wearing a garrison cap. He was clearly a Navaho (the restaurant was near the both the VA and the Indian Hospital) and on the side of the cap were stitched the words “Code Talker.” So I knew he had served same time, same place and pointed him out to my dad. He turned in his seat as I motioned to my dad and said something like “another Marine.” The veteran muttered, “yeah” with a slight smile and my dad replied, “Hell of a war,” and the other said, “yup.” That was it, that was all that was necessary. What do you do with all that grief? Yup, sure was.